Five Reasons SharePoint Is Better in the Cloud

If you’re running SharePoint onsite or are considering SharePoint for the first time, you might feel overwhelmed with all the things that it can do or struggling to implement a narrowly focused SharePoint-based solution. That’s the point where many organizations should consider running SharePoint in the cloud instead of trying to go it alone. Here are five big reasons that enterprises choose to put SharePoint in the cloud and why you should too:

1. Don’t have to do it all to do it all.The hardware, expertise and support are built into the SharePoint cloud model. When you run SharePoint on your own, you’re responsible not just for customizing the front-end to make it easy for end users to utilize, but also for ensuring the performance of the underlying hardware; integrating SharePoint with legacy systems; and more based on your SharePoint use case. Juggling it all can quickly become a burden on IT teams with dozens of other IT priorities to manage.

2. Get an expert, don’t become an expert. Running SharePoint onsite means being versed in a variety of platforms including Active Directory, SQL, Windows, ASP.NET, and IIS. Your team may know a little about all of them or a lot about a few of them. To run SharePoint properly, you need a deep understanding of each and how they drive the SharePoint environment. Before you start investing in SharePoint manuals, how-to guides and training sessions, imagine how that time could be better spent building out mission-critical systems that help your business differentiate and standout in the marketplace.

3. Reduce upfront investments and ongoing maintenance. Offloading the hardware and licensing headaches to a trusted provider helps you focus on customizing SharePoint to the unique needs of your business. You can deploy without coordinating hardware implementations or navigating the purchase and installation licenses. When you’re ready to grow SharePoint in the cloud, you can seamlessly add capacity and functionality.

4. Unleash the full potential of SharePoint. When you’re free from hardware, performance, and troubleshooting concerns, you can explore new ways to incorporate SharePoint into your business. Didn’t think of using SharePoint to manage accounting workflows, did you? And, if you’re spending all of your time just keeping SharePoint up and running, you’d probably never have time to think about out-of-box uses for SharePoint or to take advantage of SharePoint’s extensibility to add functionality that more closely matches the needs of your business.

5. Access support instantly. Whether it’s an outage or a question, you have a dedicated team of pros who can answer in seconds what could take you days of researching forums and manuals to figure out. If you’re having problems with SharePoint, you can pick up the phone and get immediate attention. As an added bonus, Rackspace SharePoint customers have over 120 combined years of concentrated SharePoint expertise backed by Fanatical Support, so customers can spend more time exploring SharePoint’s capabilities instead of figuring out how to just make it work. Our industry-leading SharePoint capabilities give customers a reliable infrastructure combined with the advanced knowledge to make it all work together.

Randy Drisgill, SharePoint Designer and SharePoint MVP and I sat down for a short video to discuss more reasons SharePoint in the cloud makes sense for business.

About the Author

This is a post written and contributed by
Chris Caravajal.

Chris has been working exclusively with SharePoint technologies since 2007. As a consultant he works with organizations on planning and implementing SharePoint solutions that vary in both size and complexity. Primarily an “out-of-the-box” specialist, Chris’ main focus is getting the most out of SharePoint with the native features and tools while also building custom InfoPath and SharePoint Designer workflow solutions. In addition to consulting, Chris also writes and presents courseware for end-users and information workers. Chris is a MCTS for MOSS 2007 and is published as a contributing author to the top-selling SharePoint technical publication Professional SharePoint 2010 Administration and as a co-author for the recently-released SharePoint2010 Field Guide.